What experience and history teach is this—that nations and governments have never learned anything from history or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

Every country has the government it deserves.

Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

A real leader is somebody who can help us overcome the limitations of our own individual laziness and selfishness and weakness and fear and get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”